Transcript
Hello internet. My name is Miles Bassett with Wildman Web Solutions, and this is Ask Wildman.
All righty. It is June 2nd, Wednesday 11 o’clock. That means that it’s time for Ask Wildman this is a q and a live Q and a produced by Wildman Web Solutions every week. My team and I jump on here and stream live to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account. To answer your questions about advertising, marketing, technology, business, or whatever else it is you want to ask us about, we will do our best.
Provide some good answers, provide some good resources. We are here to support our community. We started doing this show a little over a year ago now just to answer some frequently asked questions. We were getting at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of businesses and business owners were either getting online for the first time or all of a sudden, really needed to leverage their online presence a whole lot more than they used to.
They started coming to us the local. Digital agency and asking some questions about how to get themselves online, what to do with their websites, with their social media how to get an e-commerce and start selling their things online. So, we started doing this show to answer some of those questions and provide a lot of resources, but it’s not the only thing we started doing.
We have also put out a ton of other resources at our website. So, if you haven’t checked it out already, our website is wild men, web.com. There are tons of free resources that we put out to help our local business community. Though, I guess anyone anywhere can use this. Here in Lawrence, Kansas, and we love working locally, but a lot of this stuff pretty much applies to everyone.
Feel free to jump over there and check out our website. If you haven’t already this, is it here, Wildman, web.com. You can scroll through and learn more about us and what we do. Here you can see we’ve got a free report that you can take. Click on this. All you have to do is fill out a little bit of information about your business and we’ll generate a report of your online presence, including information about your website, your social media, your search score.
You know how the reviews that you have online, everything that we can possibly yeah, fine. We’ll put in one report and send over to you. And you can do with that, what you will, in addition to that, you’ll see, we have a whole resources tab here. We’ve got our blog. We started putting articles up there all over the place.
I know I have a couple that I need to finish up and get published out there, but recently we’ve got a couple out here on. User generated content. We talked a little bit about that last week. Actually. I think we talked a lot about that last week. If you want to go back to our last week’s show and just recently put up an article on strategies to repurpose your content.
That’s just a beautiful strategy for small business owners, especially busiest amongst us to create content and to. Use it in a number of ways so that you really only have to make one thing, and then you can repurpose that 5, 10, 20 times across different platforms through different mediums and have a more.
Let’s see more cohesive content marketing strategy. So, make sure you check back on this blog. We’ve got articles coming out all the time. Lots of great information there. We also have our live stream archives here. That’s this show posted every week. I think we’re a little behind for updating things here, but if we said something brilliant a couple of weeks ago, and you can’t remember what it is, and you can jump back here into our live stream archives, you can hit any one of these pages.
We are uploading the transcript for these shows as we get to creating those. So, you can just search through that as well. If that’s easier. New one, here is our podcast. We are live wherever podcasts can be found. If you want to just listen to this show, audio only then come here to the podcast page. And you can click any of these buttons depending on how you like to listen.
There are tons of options here and we’re coming out with more all the time. Finally, our toolkit, our free local business online toolkit. Come here, watch this little video about it, narrated by yours truly. It’s just a pile of software to help small businesses. Really business of any size to manage their online presence.
So just a little bit easier and there’s so much to do, and it can seem so overwhelming to get your business online and manage all of that effectively. We put this out here again, it’s free software for anyone who wants to sign up to help you manage your social media, your reputation, your website, your listings, and search scores.
There are tons of other tools in there to help you get started or to really take what you have and elevate it. So again, come here to this page, put out a, put a little bit of information about your business and it will get you all set up and ready to go.
All right. That being said, let’s see if I can figure out how to remove this. Here we are. We are on to today’s show. So, this is an open Q and a, we do have some questions. So, we’ve gotten over the last week or so. Emailed to us. Our email here is ask wild man@wildlandweb.com. I do have that scrolling below me here.
So, if you have a question, you want me and my team to hit, please email us there. Or if you’re watching this live, you can throw your questions in the comments below me right now. And I will answer those as they come up. Okay. So, the first question that we got here, what do we have? Oh, I guess I should address this as well.
You may notice that I’m the only one on the screen today. Normally we do have someone else jumping in here. We have usually my partner, Mike, last week, we had a special guest of Anna Mooradian jumping in and helping out. It’s just going to be me for today. So, Mike is off. Some you had a very important golf tournament right here right now.
I’ll just, you just got me today. So might be a little bit of a shorter episode, but I am the tech side of the house here at Wildman web solutions. So, feel free to send over any questions about technology, about SEO, about websites. Custom software the development process, anything like that’s really my wheelhouse.
If you have anything on the advertising and marketing side, I will do my best to answer those things, or we can hold off and, maybe we’ll get Mike jumping in later and maybe it’ll just be a next week thing. Okay. So, starting here with our first question, we’ve got a couple of questions that we’ll ask a couple of days regarding emails, setting up emails for your business.
So, I want to take a little bit of time and talk about setting up your hands. First of all, you will notice that there is a difference between business emails and regular emails. And that’s really just where you get the domain email address. That’s going to be@yourdomain.com. So, for example, you can email me miles at Wildman, web.com instead of, miles at Gmail or miles at Yahoo or something like that.
You can use those sort of generic email addresses for your business. I don’t see anything wrong with it. But it can give you an air of respectability of authority. If you have a, an email set to your actual business domain it’s not a huge functional difference there until you get into larger email marketing strategies, where there really are some advantages to leveraging your own domain.
And we can talk about that later. If you want, please throw in the comments. If you want me to dive any deeper into any of this. But if you do decide to get a domain email, there are probably a couple of things that you need to know. First of all, your email is separate from your domain. It is separate from your hosting.
It is a standalone service and a lot of places sometimes it’ll get packaged. If you buy a domain, they’ll also give you an email. If you buy hosting, they’ll also give you an email, but not always. So, make sure you are looking at that. And I know several clients that have come to us and. They’ve bought a hosting package already, or they’ve bought a domain and they expected emails to just come with it and already.
Set up for them and it wasn’t at all. So that would be, that was just one other thing we had had a set up for them and an unexpected hurdle that we had to hit in that project. Now, luckily, it’s not a huge deal, but if you’re not working with us or another professional agency, then it could be a major stumbling block.
So, make sure to watch out for, what is actually included in your bundle. And if they’re giving you these emails or not, it could be that you have to opt into that. When you do opt into those there’s a bunch of different services out there. Sometimes your hosting provider will take care of your email as well.
I know you can get an email through if you get posting through GoDaddy you can get an email with that or some of the other big hosting providers. Those can be, those can totally work for you. Sometimes they’re just an email relay. So, they’re not quite as functional. Sometimes they will come with an email client, like Gmail or outlook or something like that.
That maybe is something you’re not familiar with. You’re not comfortable using, or maybe it’s clunky. I know in the early days of wild man; we had our own email client that we would use, and it just wasn’t as robust as something like Gmail that everyone is as familiar with. Checking to see what kind of email you’re getting when you do sign up for these packages.
And if there are any restrictions, do you have to use their email client? Can they help you get set up so that, it’s sending emails to your outlook app or forwarding to your other email or however you want to do it? And watch out for some emails. I don’t actually email addresses their aliases and they’ll just forward from one thing to the other, which means that you can’t reply from that email.
Which again, it just, it’s not functionally a huge problem and it can totally work for a lot of people, but it does give you an air of authority. If you are sending and receiving emails from your domain-based emails,
A lot of the email providers out there, they will use email clients, existing email clients. That’s really what we do when we’re setting someone up for email. We have partnerships with Google and Microsoft, so we can set someone up with a Google workspace, formerly G suite email or with an office 365 account where you can get them an email that way.
That has a lot of advantages to it. And that you’re working within an ecosystem. With Google workspace, you don’t just get the email, you also get the storage space, you get Google drive, you get all of the other Google apps or with office 365, you get all of the other apps with that like word and PowerPoint and the whole 365 suite.
So, there are definitely some. Some advantages to working with one of those larger clients, they’re easier to set up. They’re probably going to cost a little bit more than some of the email clients that will come with your hosting. But I think it’s well worth it in order to get that that, that increased advantage there.
And again, it comes with that suite of products around it. So that helps you to manage your content, manage your contacts and anything that’s coming through that. Which brings me to the other point of emails that, we had come up recently. So, I’m going to throw this tip out there.
Don’t use your email for everything. I’ve seen way too many people, way too many business owners that run their business out of their email inbox. Now that’s great for a little while, ask yourself this question. What would happen if you lost your emails? You don’t control your emails. That’s living on an email server somewhere else.
And even if you’re using one of the large providers, something can happen. Anything can happen something outside of your control and that’s just gone. If you find yourself living in your email inbox, you manage all of your contacts through there. Some people will actually do like file storage in there.
They will keep documents and images and other media in their email inbox. And they’ll just search for that email and then go in and grab that document whenever they need it. That’s going to be fine, 90% of the time, but for the 10% of the time that it’s not, that can be, that can just be a devastating day if you were.
If you were to say, lose all of your cards, you’ve lost all of your contacts for your business, or if you are using it for file storage, you’ve now lost access to that document. So, I’m going to say right here and recommend that you use some sort of third-party service outside of your email. I don’t care what that is.
There’s a number of different solutions out there for contact management for file storage. Lots of them will actually work pretty well with your email. And if you are using one of those larger providers like Google or Microsoft, then you can utilize some other tools within that environment to give you a more reliable storage.
And also, just a more usable storage that the number of times I’ve seen people struggling to search back. Weeks’s months, years in their email inbox to find some document or to find some contact or something. It’s just it’s impractical at a certain point. So, if you’re still there, you’re still living in your email inbox and you’re using your inbox to run your business.
Then now’s the time to make that change. Switch out of that. Get a CRM, get a contact management tool. There are even free ones out there if you want some specific recommendations reach out and we will happily provide some there. But yeah, you can’t run your business off your inbox of your email inbox.
It’s just, it’s too much of a risk.
Let’s see. I think that was all the questions we had on just emails here. But if you want if you have some other questions, you want me to dive a little bit deeper into any of that. Please throw your questions in the comments or email us at ask while Matt, while my web.com. And we’ll get to those while they’re email you back or hit these hit your question next week.
As we do this every week, Wednesdays at 11.
All right. The next topic I wanted to hit here was on custom software development. You may have noticed if hopefully you’ve gone to our website while my web.com under services, we do have a service called custom software development. We had someone. Ask recently, what that was, what does that mean?
Cause it is broad and intentionally, so most of the products and services that we offer as a digital marketing company are in some sense of the word outward facing, they are built to get your company in front of your audience in front of your clients in front of your customer base in one way or another.
And this is the one that really doesn’t, whether we’re running. No Facebook ad campaign or doing some search engine optimization to get someone found or, setting up some listings or building a website. All of those things are built to get a company in front of people online to extend their online presence, to get them found, to make it easier for their audience to interact with them online.
No, a number of different ways to engage with a business online, but all of it is very customer facing custom software development is the one thing that we do that is purely internal. So, I want to talk about it a little bit, or this isn’t something that your customers are ever going to see. It’s not something that, most likely any of your audience are really going to know that you’re actually doing.
This is all about. Improving your internal processes saving you time, saving you money, saving you some sanity, perhaps here and there. And just making your job easier so that you can serve your customers better. As my partner, Mike says all the time good advertising or good marketing is going to do one of two things.
It’s either going to grow your business, or it’s going to put you out of business. The idea there is that a good marketing campaign or good advertising is going to amplify. What’s already there. If you have a good product, you’ve got awesome service. You’ve got a good company, then a good marketing campaign will help you to grow that business.
5, 10, 50 times it’ll be a huge growth spurt because you’re able to get what strengths you have and put them out to the right people at the right time in the room. If, however, there are weaknesses, there are holes in your in your marketing bridge. Maybe your product’s good, but your customer service is lacking.
Maybe there’s some other products or problems with how you execute on things. As soon as we start driving a bunch of traffic to that’s going to be tons of excess pressure on an already weak point. And that’s going to cause more pain. So, when we’re talking about custom software development, we want to look for some of those weak points and ask, is there anything that you do, look at your day to day?
Is there anything that you do that is monotonous, that you’re doing all the time that you know, could be done faster? It just seems. No, there’s too many steps involved in doing this very regular activity. That’s where something like a piece of software or some sort of automation can jump in and actually save you a bunch of time and energy and therefore money, and hopefully help you to serve your customers better to improve your business as a whole.
So that when we do elevate everything with a brilliant marketing campaign or a new website or whatever else it is that we’re doing to get you in front of you, there isn’t that weak point anymore. And you can serve that that new influx of customers better. An example that came to mind from when I was thinking about this before the show was on a friend of mine, at one point was working for a company that produced very specialty.
Products. They designed these products, they built them they’re in-house they had a warehouse, and they would build everything specifically for each client. All the products were, basically the same kind of thing, but they would customize each of those orders for Clients. And depending on the dimensions that they needed or the other specific specifications that were requested by that client on that specific order, they would have to modify their products just a little bit.
And so, to keep track of all that, they had a huge amount of documents that would Detailed the iterations of the design process. They would talk about each of their different products, the specifications that they have, the different design changes that have happened over time, the dimensions of everything, so that they could combine all of those products into a deliverable product per order.
And. Those documents were living in an incredibly complicated file structure. So, in order to access the document, that’s going to tell me just the basic dimensions of this process. I would have to open up file Explorer, go to the folder of the year, go to the folder of the month, go to the folder of the day, and then go to the product folder under that, and then navigate through this crazy file structure or to find a document, pull that out onto my local computer, make the changes, and then put it back into the proper place and navigate out.
He found that to be incredibly inefficient, and a waste of time every day. So, I’m keeping track of it and realized that he was spending a not unsubstantial amount of time doing this process every single. And across the entire team, they were all doing this. So, if you added all that up, there was probably a couple of hours of wasted time every day.
And this team was a highly specialized, highly educated, not cheap labor kind of team. So, a couple of hours a day over the course of an entire year, it was really wasting a lot of time and a lot of money not to mention it was frustrating, the hell out of him and his team all day, every day, having to work with this thing.
So that’s where. Custom software came in. We spoke with them about develop, developing an application, developed an app, a desktop app that instead of opening file Explorer and navigating through this labyrinth of files in order to get to what they needed, they would just open up this little desktop app and they could search and sort and filter, and it would go through that file structure, grab exactly what they needed and when they decided to, they put it in the file name, they put in the date, they put.
No family of products they were looking for and it would give them a series of links. They can then click on that link, and it would immediately open up that PDF or that file. Then as they S when they modified it and save it, it would automatically save it back into the right place and give it the proper naming convention so that it was renamed as the next iteration of that product design, rather than overriding the former one and putting it back in the file structure in the proper place, just doing something like that, making a little desktop app, all it was But, one little front facing application and then a Python script in the backend to do this search function ended up saving them tons of time.
And like I said, sanity for that team. I don’t know exactly what the dollar amount would be for saving all that time. But like I said, a couple of hours a day across the team over several years. The return on investment on that was immediate. And that’s that kind of thing that we’re looking at when we’re talking about custom software development.
If you have something in your business that just seems harder than it needs to be, or if you’re doing the same thing all day, every day, or if you’re having to hire this out, you’ve got an assistant, you’ve got a virtual assistant, or you’ve tasked one of your one of your staff with doing this thing as the same thing every day, you feel like someone’s wasting time doing this process and that it could be done.
That’s probably where we need to have a conversation, or you need to speak with a developer. So hopefully that answers some questions here and gives a little bit of clarity as to what we’re talking about. When we talk about our custom software development service and where that might fit into a small business scenario.
If you have any questions on that you want me to dive deeper, or maybe you have a specific use case in mind that you want me to try to tackle here, live on air. I’ll do my best. Please throw that in the comments below or email us at ask wild. Matawan my web.com. And we will get back to you on that. All right.
Almost exactly at the halfway point. And it looks like I may have someone joining me here. Mike are you there? And miles, come in. Hello. Hey mate. Hey, can you hear me now? How in the heck are you doing this morning? I am doing good. I’m really, I’m testing out my, just talking by myself muscles here. It’s pretty nice.
Pretty weak sauce over here. Ah, yeah, I remember the first time I tried to do a solo live radio show for a whole hour by myself and afterwards I was like, I think next time when we get some frequent guests, it gets exhaustive to talk that long by yourself, even for us, even for people like that. We’d love to talk, pardon? Pardon? My tardiness, sir. Okay. That is okay. I’m happy to have you joining me here. How was the golf? It was good. I only stayed for the first tee shot, the opening tee shot, but it was right down the fairway. And. You did great. Yeah. My, my son is playing over at Eagle bend today in Kansas junior tournament.
Hopefully he’s going to, he’s going to keep it together and put 18 holes together and have a good round. We’ll see. I’m going to, I’m going to show up there at the end and chairman, but yeah, he started off good at least so awesome. We won’t take too much more time here. Like I said, he’d been on for about a half an hour and wrap up here in a little bit, but.
So far, I talked a little bit about business, email, setting up emails, getting your domain email, and some benefits for doing that then jumped into, I guess you heard the very end of my talk there about custom software development and where that might make sense for a small business. As I think just as a use case, there is a helpful sample and getting people to wrap their minds around where they could use something like that.
Too many people we talk to. I see where I can use a website for my business, but what are you talking about with a piece of custom software? Why would I need that? So hopefully that use case helps to clarify that for some people and let you know how this can be helpful for you.
Plus, it’s fun for me. It’s a unique challenge every time, instead of just building a website for a business, you have to walk in and really understand what they’re doing. And it’s a union. And truly custom experience every single time you get to build a tool like that. So just for selfish purposes alone, it’s fun.
Hey fun is what it’s all about.
Okay, so we don’t have any questions coming in the comments right now. I think I covered the ones in the email inbox here. Have you gotten anything on your side? Yeah, I kind of just wanted to back out here for a minute and talk about something from 30,000 feet that simply we talk about a lot we’ve talked about in the in the recent past, with the pandemic and everything, but I’ve been getting a new set of questions around the same kind of subject with a whole new set of problems coming about.
So, I thought, yeah. So, I thought maybe we could address this a little bit and see if you have any thoughts and hopefully it’s something that’s just going to be a temporary problem for a lot of small businesses, but. I’m talking about automation, first of all, as the solution of the subject.
And the problem I’m talking about is how a lot of industries, especially. The restaurant industry, the event industry, the retail industry, basically anything that’s face to face, it’s been great that people are, we’re in the waning days of this incredibly disastrous global pandemic, but people are feeling more confident as well.
Vaccines, spreads, and cases go down to go out and do more. In-person shopping more in-person events, more in-person dining, et cetera, et cetera, which is great for all these businesses who have been just catastrophic, really affected by all the lockdowns and COVID and everything else.
But now they have a whole new set of problems, as you, as everyone’s probably aware of on the hiring side of things. That they, a lot of them can’t find enough people to fill out their staffing to even keep normal business hours. Some of them are even closing because of it, but a lot of people are either having to pare down their offerings or pare down their hours so on and so forth.
And so, it occurred to me and talking to a lot of these people over the course of the last few weeks that there may be some solutions in there that we were thinking. Primarily as a way to attract consumers who were not wanting to come into your physical space, but it may be a way to. Serve your consumers who are willing to come into you to your space or to do deal with you in a different way that doesn’t require as much human power, our manpower for lack of a better term.
And so, automation could be a key to keep some of these small businesses afloat. We were talking with a client the other day and talking about, music venues and how touchless ordering could revolutionize, the way that beverages are served and at a concert.
And it would take a lot less staffing, in one of the iterations of a solution that we came up with in order to execute it well, when you don’t have the staffing to execute how you would normally do. This becomes a very valuable tool for you very quickly. And like I said, we don’t know how long this is.
This whole employment shortage is going to last. Hopefully not as long as the pandemic, but nobody, he really knows. And so, I think it would be really smart instead of closing your business or, cutting down your hours and making less money to try to find some solutions, even if they are temporary solutions in order to keep serving your customers at the same volume that you’re.
You’re currently hoping to do so miles, I wanted to get your thoughts on that. And then just a side note, half joking, but half serious here, because we do joke about this sometimes, but it is a serious subject as well. It’s a little bit ironic that, In the doom doomsday scenario that the robots would be coming in to replace the humans, begrudgingly against the humans will, but now it seems like
maybe replaced for things that they don’t even want it to do. And the robots are coming in to save the other humans that need the workforce power. So, a little bit of interesting twist here to this ever-evolving saga of technology. Melding with the economy. So, what are your thoughts on that mouse?
Your second point of, half doomsday movie and half joke, there was, it was actually where I was going to come into this. I don’t know a frame around this or a caveat for, I’m not entirely sure how to classify this. Because some of these things could be some really great short-term solutions for people looking to hire or who just don’t have the manpower to do the things that they need to do to run their business.
But in general, automation doesn’t have to be a replacement. I think too many times people think about automation. They hear the word automation, they think, oh, we’re replacing people, we’re replacing roles or. The final concerning thought thereof, oh no, I’m being replaced. And I don’t think that while, that can be the case.
And I w I won’t deny it. That is the case. Some places that don’t have to be the way that we frame in automation it can replace something. It can also augment, and it can also. Free. So, it can augment your ability to serve customers and to run your business, it can make you more effective at what you’re doing, rather than replacing the person that’s doing something.
It just makes them able to do more and to do their job better or to do something faster or to do something more effective. I was talking earlier about a piece of software that just allowed these engineers to. Work more effectively and to do more of what they’re actually hired to do, because they weren’t hired to sit there for 20 minutes a day, navigating a boring file structure.
They were hired to design things and to build these products. So, it’s not that they were being replaced by this little piece of automation, but rather it was augmenting their ability to do their actual job. And it can free people. It can free people from these silly monotonous tasks that they don’t really need to be doing.
And again, allow them to be more effective in what they’re doing, allow them to do what it is that they want to be doing. And speaking as a business owner yeah. I really value my staff and we’ve got some really talented, really awesome people that we’ve worked with. And I want them to do the things that they love.
I want them to do the things that they’re good at and not be bogged down by all these extra little bits that, no one really wants to do. So as the robots come in and take over, hopefully they’re taking over in a way that, is allowing us to. Explore our talents and be more effective in our workplaces rather than.
Replacing people. So, I just wanted to add that frame around this conversation, as we do talk about automation maybe it does have a particular meaning here in this context, when we are in a labor shortage, and we have small businesses that are struggling to get things done and to run their business.
This could be a Band-Aid to slap on there, but in the long run and outside of this context, automation is a huge variable. That’s not going away. It’s really just going to grow and impact our lives more and more, especially as business owners here. And we’ve got to make sure to throw it within that proper framing and understand it as something that can augment and free our employees rather than just replace humans.
Yeah. Great point there miles. Yeah. I think, a lot of times that is a big misconception in yeah, really the fundamental purpose of automation is. Increased productivity with the human power that you already have. It’s not necessarily to replace that human power it’s to make the three times more productive, efficient, and therefore valuable to the company.
So that’s a great point. I’m glad you threw that. And, when we’re talking about certain elements of automation or, having some sort of AI powered tool, jump in and help out your business. And we’ve talked about chat bots before that can be a really powerful online tool where we can leverage.
This really smart piece of software to help us and run their, run our business and communicate more effectively to our customers, but we are not trying to replace that human interaction. In fact, we’re trying to accelerate the process of getting our customers to actually talk to a human being and get them to, our staff and our people in a more effective.
Way so that when they land there, we’ve got all the information. We need to have a really meaningful conversation with them. Instead of just having them chat with a robot all day, I get frustrated and leave. So, there are some things where, human interaction is not going anywhere.
And the actual natural skills of a human being are invaluable, but these little pieces of technology, these automations. These sort of AI powered tools that are coming into the marketplace can help us to augment those capabilities and get more human interaction out of our existing staff and into the hands of our potential audience.
So, I guess that’s the important point that I want to make here. And it ties perfectly into my conversation about custom software development. We’re just trying to use these tools to empower you and your staff to, to do what it is that you do best to run your business, rather than focus on these boring little tasks that no one really wants to do, but absolutely have to.
And that could be managing your online presence posting things to social media that could be navigating a complex file structure or that could be managing your contacts and having a custom CRM, whatever that thing is, technology can jump in there and augment your ability to do those tasks.
It’s not replacing anything. It’s just making you better at your job. In the context of, restaurants and music venues, we were talking about contactless ordering. There are lots of really smart things that are, that businesses are thinking outside of the box and using some of these technologies to exist within the.
The current situation. And whether that’s dealing with the pandemic making people feel more comfortable and safer in their business environment or dealing with a lack of people in their business a lack of employees or a labor shortage. Thinking outside of the box and leveraging some of these tools has been really interesting is it has been very interesting to watch how some of these businesses tackle those things and to help many of them to leverage technology, to tackle those.
No with your example, the music venues, there was an unintended consequence that we just ran into within the conversation we were having. We were talking about contactless ordering obviously for COVID reasons. And also trying to minimize how. No staff was actually needed to run this and minimize costs and everything.
But also, we realized how annoying is it when you’re at a show, it’s a loud, there’s loud music everywhere. You’re going up to the bar and you have to scream at this poor bartender about what, what drinks you want. Instantiating a system for contactless. Ordering allows you to submit your order on your phone and then just, show your order to the bartender.
And they know what it is that you have, what you’ve ordered, and it ends up skipping. Annoying feature of the business that we’ve all just learned to deal with up until this point. And so unintentionally we’ve tackled a problem. We didn’t even know we had while addressing some of these more situational issues.
That’s a fun thing that can arise out of these out of these solutions as well. A hundred percent. Yeah. I have a couple updates here from the news desk miles. If you’d like me to get into that before we wrap up the probe. Please. Okay. A couple of least exciting to me things.
And one, one really fun thing. Our Google, our good friends over there at alphabet Inc. We’re making a lot of news. But we we’re going to focus in on the ad side of things here. We’ve talked a lot about Facebook and to a lesser extent, Google over the past few months, especially in Q1 now in Q2 that we have the new iOS update and what that means for third party tracking and basically the state of visual advertising and not to rehash all the conversations we’ve been having.
Long story short the entire landscape has changing. That doesn’t mean it’s going away or becoming impossible to do. It’s just you’re going to have to, not do what you did before and adapt and evolve to the changing landscape as always happens in these types of things. And the latest news of Google.
I’m not going to get too much into the nerdy marketing stuff because you guys probably don’t care about all the nuts and bolts. I’ll try to keep this pretty top line, but basically, they’re going to make it easier for us to make some money on Google. So that’s really good news, especially if you’re an e-commerce or anything.
Yeah. Driven related on your website or your mobile app you’re going to be able to tap into Google ads in a way that you really haven’t been able to do before. And you’re going to be able to leverage some. Some of their partner data. And they’ve also going to be doing some integrations across platforms like woo commerce and square and some other big platforms as well.
And so, people can basically, it’s basically going to be a work around to the problem that we’ve been talking about with third-party data after Google made their latest updates. Google announces several expansions to Google ads and its e-commerce platform. This just the other day, the tech giant emphasizes that marketers will have increased access to many Google ad tools, including targeting model, consumer match, automated programs, smart bidding, and performance tracking platform performance.
Max, YouTube, and display ads will also be integrated into these platforms to enhance data driven measurement. So, they’re basically going to give us a workaround. And we’re going to be able to be, have much better results are going to be able to track our conversions, not exactly the way that we did before, but in, in a new way, that is going to, I think be extremely advantageous to us.
So that’s the good news out of Google for all of you who were counting on Google ads for sales, especially I said, if you’re in the e-commerce world, there’s going to be a lot more options for you. Then there was after that, Third-party tracking went away. Another quick update too, since we’re in the family of Google and we would talk about quite a few times over in 2021, I believe it was one of our main tips at the beginning of the year for people to jump into YouTube advertising and miles.
I don’t know if it’s just the reach of this show and how many viewers we have that we moved the needle that much, or if it was. Forces beyond our control, but YouTube is experiencing a 49% lift in ad revenue over last quarter. So apparently, it’s not just us who have been dumping money into YouTube ads.
But that is becoming a massive platform. For advertisers in the face of this whole iOS update in third-party tracking, going away, I was just talking to an advertiser or excuse me, a PR client about this. Just last on Friday, actually miles said, to be honest with you, your best bet by far for what you’re doing is YouTube advertising.
It’s just getting an incredible return on it. And that’s one of the other themes here, miles that we’re seeing now, the news, I’m not going to get too much into. The weeds on this one, cause it gets pretty nerdy pretty quick. What we’re seeing is that a lot of these brands and especially some of these brands that were really hurt by the pandemic, but ones who have been smartly investing money and investing more money into digital advertising are seeing huge windfalls right now.
And so, I’ll quickly just dive into this gap, one of the really distressed retail brands out there. Before the pandemic hit is reported 4 billion in net sales in the first quarter of 2021, an 89% increase compared with the same quarter in two 12 to 2020 and an 8% lift when compared with 2019, the retailer attributed its sales growth to its digital marketing investments made during the past several quarters.
And I know a lot of people became. Doge coin millionaires recently, but beyond that, the really the greatest return on investment that any business can be making right now is to create an effective marketing plan and to invest a lot of money into that marketing plan, because that is going to get you incredible return on investments.
I’m actually working on an article about that right now. Miles probably be ready for next week’s newsletter. Good reminder everybody to jump into the newsletter chain. If you’re not on board with that. And we’re going to deep dive into some of the tactics and statistics around how to get a great return on your ad spend or RO as we call it in the business.
But yeah. Gap old Navy. And a few of their brands are seeing just huge surges after they pivoted, and they made different moves and different plans at the beginning of the pandemic with their marketing. And then, there’s other brands like banana Republic that didn’t pivot and move as hard and their steel, or excuse me, their sales are still really strong.
And so, it’s interesting now that we’re seeing all this data and we can really compare it year over year of what shaken out between the winners and the losers. And you can see, a clear line between who did what and who ended up with big gains and who ended up either flat or still with losses.
Now as we come into the deep, into the second quarter of 2021, so that’s a. That I’ll leave the data. Talk behind there. Four-minute miles. And I’ll end here on a bit of a fun news piece for everybody. We got Father’s Day, of course, coming up here in a few weeks, make sure you go out and get something great for your dad, but Miller light in new balance.
Have teamed up with a great idea called those are some dead plant brands. Exactly. We’ll get into that here in a minute. You know what this means for the brand, but I really love just the thinking outside the box here miles. So, Miller, light and new balance have teamed up on a dad shoe beer cruise.
Called the Shoozy. That is right. It is actually a functional beer koozie that is made out of the new balance shoe. And again, I really love this promo for a couple of different reasons, yes. Because it makes you chuckle, it makes you laugh. It’s functional. People can actually use it. And yeah.
Even if it’s silly, you can’t say you can go to a barbecue with fellow dads, and this is not the talk of the whole event. So, people are going to instantly talk about it. They’re going to want to share it, et cetera, et cetera. It has that aspect to it. But yeah, the first thing I said when I said dads and those two brands Myles picked up on it is that is just such a S With the brand image with the target audience that they’re going for here.
And I really love it on the new balance side of things because new balance is almost taking like an, I don’t want to say a negative, like a knock that people almost like it’s like you get made fun of, if you’re a dad, that wears new balances. And by the way, I am a dad that I used to work since.
And I didn’t mind people, I almost leaned into the joke. It was like, I know our, which is also a little bit of a dad shoe. But I tell you what, you get old. Yeah. You got to take care of your feet. Okay. And after two broken feet, that’s what I realized. So that’s neither here nor there, they’re turning that negative if you will, into a positive, right.
And they’re leaning into it, they’re making it fun. They’re making it accessible that yeah. We are a dad shoe. They’re owning it. And going back to that idea that, hey, if there’s no such thing as baffled Felicity, if they’re talking about it, as long as you haven’t killed somebody, or, one of the unmentionable things that, has never forgiven in society, it can always be a good thing if you’re going to spin it in the right direction and use that PR in the right way.
So that’s why I just love it from the angle of. Miller light courses. It also makes a ton of sense, and they sell a crap ton of beer around the summertime and in of course, to dads and barbecues and everything like that. So just a little fun, little, a Father’s Day promo story there to wrap up the new segment miles.
I’ll toss it back to you to wrap up the show, but that’s all I got here. Yeah, that was a really fun way to end things here. And I think an unintentional. Maybe intentional. I don’t know. Maybe you’re playing 40 DHS over there, but hi, back into you into the story about that with the, before that, with the gap where I think is actually a really important takeaway, especially for our audience, for small businesses.
I know we’ve talked about this in the past, but I really want to drive it home here with. One of our advantages as small businesses, even though all the big boys out there, they have way more money. They have more power; they can do everything more and bigger and better. One thing that we have over them is our ability to pivot and do so quickly.
We are small and therefore we are agile. It can take a lot to move a company like new balance or a chorus light or. The gap and you can see how effective their pivoting strategies have been here, whether they are, moving their physical retail online and really focusing on a different market here, or if they are making some fun out of the box marketing connections by, making the beer, koozie, the new, balanced beer koozie They’re just demonstrating the power of a pivot there.
And that’s something that we, as small businesses can do better than anyone. And so, keeping your ear to the ground, listening to what’s actually happening, paying attention to your audience and to the environment around you and staying agile, being okay with it. Taking some chances, making a few directional changes, trying some stuff, and leveraging that incredible superpower you have as a small business and your ability to modify yourself and to move around the market.
I think especially now is going to be an incredibly powerful. Strategy for businesses of all sizes, but particularly our audience is small businesses to use those two stories are just perfect examples of what can be done. An incredible marketing strategy, or what’d you say, like 89% growth year over year.
That’s that is just a ridiculous presenter that I think any of us would be pretty happy to get. I just wanted to draw that through line, through those, both of those stories. And again, drive home the point that we, as small businesses, we can do something that they can’t we’re agile. Stay on your toes here.
All right. We are coming up on an hour here. Thank you, Mike, for jumping in here at the last the last little bit hopefully we good information there. If you have any questions, like I said, please email us, ask while Manuela web.com and we will hit those topics next week, next Wednesday at 11, where we will be back here, live streaming to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch.
So, pick your poison there. Or if you’re catching this later, you’re not watching us, please. Email us and we’ll get to you there. Hondo we’re set. I think we’ll wrap up for the day and see all next week. Thanks Mike. Thanks miles. Thanks for watching.
